The Internal Exile of Dulce María Loynaz

“Poetry is transit,” the Cuban poet Dulce María Loynaz wrote in a 1950 lecture on her own process.

Photograph Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

All around Latin America, there are rivers, farms, streets,
neighborhoods, and towns named Salsipuedes, which means “Leave If You
Can.” The original site bearing this name may be a tributary of the Río
Negro, in Uruguay, where, in 1831, President Fructuoso Rivera’s army
captured the few members of the Charrúa people who had survived the
genocidal Salsipuedes campaign. The river flowed on from that moment
of terror, carrying the trace of blood and dispossession inside a name
that people would come to sing with sweet nostalgia: in 1948, the
Colombian bandleader Lucho Bermúdez made it a popular song,
“Salsipuedes, Tierra de Amor” (“Leave If You Can, Land of Love.”)

It is the Celia Cruz version of the song that echoed in my ears as I
read “Absolute
Solitude,”
James O’Connor’s recent translations of the Cuban poet Dulce María
Loynaz, who died twenty years ago. Both Cruz and Loynaz were major
artists of twentieth-century Cuba whose careers were permanently altered
by the Revolution. In July, 1960, Cruz and her band, La Sonora
Matancera, decided to stay abroad while on tour in Mexico, and Fidel
Castro, resentful, never let them reënter the country, not even for the
funeral of Cruz’s father. Yet she would remain La Guarachera de
Cuba, always identified with the island she left behind. By contrast,
Dulce María Loynaz stayed in Cuba, in what scholars refer to as an
“internal exile.” She stopped writing and publishing her poetry and
rarely left her family mansion in Vedado, Havana. “Quiero vivir en
Salsipuedes,” Cruz sings: “I want to live in Leave If You Can.”

What does it mean to stay without staying, or to leave without leaving?
These are a migrant’s questions, or the questions of a would-be migrant.
They take on a broadly existential tone in the work of Loynaz, whose
prose poems are often described as apolitical. Poem XC, first published
in Spain in her 1953 collection, “Poems Without a Name,” provides a
sense of her mysterious mental weather:

The rains displace me without washing me away, the winds push me about without breaking my form, or my identity. I remain myself, but I constantly lose my center, or what I thought my center was, or what my center will never be.

We tend to assume that political poetry announces its commitment to the
here and now. Loynaz leaves us at sea, favoring an elemental vocabulary
of rains, winds, rivers, waves, wings, and stars. Her poems make no
reference to scenes, figures, or events in Cuban history, remote or
recent. Instead, they ride a recursive current. They inspire doubt in
the power of forward movement to manifest a new reality.

In other moments from “Poems Without a Name,” she is “prisoner of a flow
without meaning”; she writes, “we could walk until morning and never get
anywhere.” Sometimes Loynaz seems to imagine that her own writing could
restore vitality to all that’s been left behind by time’s passage: “my
water is not for the new shoots. I am here to water the stump, for it is
dry.” More often, though, as in Poem CXIV, she imagines that she herself
is among the abandoned:

The entire world is empty before me, left by men who forgot to take me with them.I am alone on this vast earth, my only company animals who were left behind as well, and trees, which were not thought necessary.Tomorrow, when they no longer hear the meadowlark’s song, when they no longer smell the rose’s perfume, they will remember there was a bird and a flower and maybe then they will think it was good to have had them.But when they no longer have my timid poems, nobody will know that I once walked among them.

Here, her abstract anxiety takes on a sharper edge, one she would come
to experience still more keenly after the Revolution: “does my sweetness
lie so deep within me you need to cut me to find it?”

Though Loynaz predicted that “men,” specifically, would be the agents of
her abandonment, she began her life blessed by her country’s patriarchs.
She was born in 1902, the year that Cuba seized sovereignty from Spain.
Her father, Enrique Loynaz del Castillo, was a celebrated figure in the
Cuban War of Independence; he fought alongside his friend José Martí.
The Loynaz family was not only patriotic but wealthy: chandeliers, white
peacocks, private tutors, world travel. In the nineteen-thirties and
forties, the family’s palatial home was a hub for the great writers of
the Spanish-speaking world, including Juan Ramón Jiménez, Federico
García Lorca, and Gabriela Mistral. Enrique Loynaz encouraged his
firstborn’s talent for poetry, sending her work to Havana’s most
important newspaper, La Nación, which published two verses, “Vesperal”
and “Winter,” when she was just seventeen. Though she struggled to find
success with her first book in Cuba, she found an audience in Spain in
the nineteen-fifties, where her next five books were published to great
acclaim across the Spanish-speaking world. Juan Ramón Jiménez praised
the “mystic irony” of “Ophelia Loynaz the Subtle.” The Uruguayan
modernist Juana de Ibarbourou christened her “the first woman of
América.” The Mexican megastar Maria Félix considered playing the lead
in a film adaptation of “Jardín,” the poet’s only novel.

When the Revolution came, in 1959, Loynaz may have been briefly
imprisoned. O’Connor cites a conversation with a close friend of Loynaz
in support of this claim, which is difficult to confirm while the Cuban
state maintains the privacy of its records regarding dissidents. At the
very least, we know that Loynaz was accused of supporting Batista, the
overthrown dictator, and the Spanish editions of her books were removed
from Cuba’s National Library. Though her class background and failure to
join the Communist Party were enough to mark her as a potential traitor,
the radical interiority of her work also posed an implicit threat to the
ideology of the Revolution in its early days. In Poem LXXXVI, Loynaz,
addressing a lover, writes, “even though I’m yours, I keep everything
from you”; the line figures the poet’s soul as riches withheld—the
ultimate private property. But throughout her work Loynaz distinguishes
spiritual privacy and material possessions: in Poem II, “my word . . .
is not a coffer for the things we covet.” And in the poem that provides
the title for O’Connor’s translations, she writes: “the world gave me
many things, but the only thing I ever kept was absolute solitude.” If
she is greedy, she is greedy only for her own mind.

It would be thirty years before the fall of the Soviet Union loosened
the aesthetic criteria of the Cuban regime enough to allow for a renewed
interest in Loynaz’s work. The majority of her books were only published
at home after she received Spain’s 1992 Cervantes Prize, the highest
literary honor in the Spanish language. By then she was ninety years
old, and not in the best shape to enjoy her sudden renown, though she did
receive a steady flow of literary pilgrims at her home, always at 5
p.m. But even after her death, in 1997, this reclamation has remained ambivalent. In 2003, the
Cuban government raided the Dulce María Loynaz Library and confiscated
more than a thousand books as part of a broader campaign to eliminate
independent libraries operating beyond the purview of the state. Two
years later, her former home was meticulously restored on the basis of
old photographs and transformed into a museum, the Dulce María Loynaz
Cultural Center. A visitor to Havana can still see the courtyard with
its towering stone statue of a headless woman, and, in the garden, a
silence that can’t be unheard.

Is it justifiable to read her work, the vast majority of which was
written before the Revolution, in light of her post-revolutionary life?
To do so is, on one level, plainly anachronistic, and yet there is an
uncanny clarity to her vision of internal exile:

My new master even lets me deceive myself by letting me see, right there where they’ve always been, the sky, the sun, and the horizons that used to be mine, horizons I now flee without fleeing and bite without biting while I wait to know what exactly they’re going to do with me.

The Cuban critic Zaida Capote Cruz has written that Loynaz silenced
herself “due to her own character traits.” But, by the
nineteen-eighties, Loynaz herself was clear on the subject; in a letter
to another Cuban critic, Aldo Martínez Malo, she refused to provide
information for a proposed biography: “My own country silenced me for
more than twenty years. How to pretend now that everything has changed
when I am closer to death than to life?” It doesn’t seem right to regard
her poems as outside history, since their itinerary has been so tightly
intertwined with our shared hemispheric centuries of revolutions, coups,
and embargoes national and international.

But what history does her work live inside? “Poetry is transit,” Loynaz
wrote in a 1950 lecture on her own process. Her pattern of publication
repeatedly pulled her writing outside its moment of composition, and
placed it in new contexts: poems she wrote in the twenties were not
published until 1938; the novel she finished in 1935 was not published
at all until 1951, and did not appear in Cuba until 1994. In her
lifetime, Loynaz sometimes lamented these generational disconnects: “You
know, it’s sad to start over with people who didn’t exist when I
existed.” Her grief can be contagious. I count myself among the
lloronas of Poem CIX: “women wept for the dead women who had never
known me as if they wept for themselves.” It feels reparative to hear
her alongside Celia Cruz, humming as I read, tuning parallel channels
until they harmonize.

Now more people can read her poems in the United States, at a moment
when it seemed, briefly, as if relations between Loynaz’s country and
this one would warm. U.S. policy toward Cuba has had its own role in
stifling the rich and storied cultural exchange between the migrant
peoples of the Americas. The disappearance of Loynaz is marked by the
unique trajectory of Cuban history, but she is far from the only woman
writer who, once widely celebrated, fell into almost total obscurity for
a time. Such disappearances often begin willfully, then slowly come to
seem like the natural lay of the land. Dulce María Loynaz reminds me to
ask, relentlessly, “what flowers did I step on pretending I didn’t see
them?”

Carina del Valle Schorske is a poet and translator and a Ph.D. student in comparative literature at Columbia University.